BOOK REVIEW

     _Mark Twain, Travel Books, and Tourism: The Tide of a Great
     Popular Movement_.  By Jeffrey Alan Melton.  University of
     Alabama Press, 2002.  184 pp, 6 x 9.  Cloth. ISBN
     0-8173-1160-2. $34.95.

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          Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by:
          Mary Leah Christmas

     Copyright (c) 2002 Mark Twain Forum.  This review may not be
     published or redistributed in any medium without permission.


The first thing one notices about Jeffrey Alan Melton's _Mark Twain, Travel
Books, and Tourism_--because it happens in the first two pages--is that
Melton twice uses the word "beloved." This is a tip-off that we are
entering revered territory and must remove our shoes.  Perhaps that is why
this reviewer, who compulsively attacks books with her editorial pencil,
has made not a single mark in this one, keeping all her notes on a separate
pad of paper.  This is highly unusual and a tribute to Melton's gentle,
though not necessarily uncritical, examination of his subject matter.

As Larzer Ziff did in _Return Passages: Great American Travel Writing,
1780-1910_ (Yale University Press, reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum on 31
May 2001), Melton uses Mark Twain's travel writings as barometers of his
intellectual and emotional growth. Melton, however, does not peer
disdainfully through his lorgnette.  After all, who among us would be the
same person we were at 34 (_Innocents Abroad_) when we reached 60
(_Following the Equator_)?

Instead, Melton approaches Mark Twain's Pentateuch of travel writings with
great emphasis on "expectations," a word appearing countless times in the
book, along with its ubiquitous twin, "authentic."   These words appear on
many successive pages; at times, more than once on a page; and on occasion
even repeated in the same paragraph.  The twin drumbeats mysteriously halt
about three-quarters of the way through the book, only to sneak up again
from behind in the last few pages.

The drumming does not distract so much as herald that Melton is delivering
again on his premise.  Throughout the book he informs us how Mark Twain
sought to meet the expectations of the reading public enamored of travel
books, and that

     ...perhaps the most difficult challenge for the travel writer is to
     capitalize on those expectations and to mock them on occasion
     without alienating readers. Twain most often succeeds on both
     counts. (143)

Mark Twain succeeds because there is "a wealth of pleasure available in
pictures, [those] controlled and contrived images of reality" (142), and in
the travel books containing them.  While plumbing the shallow end of the
touristic tidal pool for humorous effect, he takes the opportunity to
instruct:

     Knowing well the importance of catering to reader expectations,
     [Mark Twain] carefully incorporated educational material within all
     of his narratives....choosing often to manipulate expectations for
     his readers' entertainment and his own satirical interests.  He
     thus achieves a tenuoud balance between following form and
     snubbing it. (33)

When the drumbeats paused, it was to allow an interlude examining Mark
Twain's "dream of color."  This term, too, flourishes in its season and has
its purpose.  While reading these passages, this reviewer was reminded of
the many color-laden implications in the film "Pleasantville."

Melton's book addresses the issues of race, imperialism and culture in a
measured, thoughtful way.  Melton is writing to inspire, not writing to
impress.  To his credit, there is no academic jargon in sight.  His lengthy
ruminations do not come across as filler because they aren't.  One realizes
Melton is making deliberate headway and guiding the reader upstream, not
simply allowing the reader to be swept passively along with the tide.

That having been said, _Mark Twain, Travel Books, and Tourism_ can still
seem a bit disjointed.  The project began as a doctoral dissertation, with
some portions previously appearing as separate pieces in scholarly
publications.  In gathering them together, there may have been created some
unintended reiteration of material.  For instance, the object called a
Claude Glass is defined in full on both pages 63 and 103.  (As an aside,
the index claims these pages mark the item's only appearances, though it is
also on page 162.)  Here is another example of repeated material, but this
one gets turned on its head:

     Any touristic production, in addition to asking for imaginative leaps
     from the audience, also implicitly asks for what I call touristic
     faith, a phrase adapted from Coleridge's "poetic faith," wherein
     readers experience a "willing suspension of disbelief." (12)

     In recognition of the play, tourists allow for "a willing suspension
     of disbelief," to adapt Samuel Taylor Coleridge's well-known
     description of poetic faith.  For my purposes here, this obliging
     participation in the illusion can be called "touristic faith." (61)

Larzer Ziff's _Return Passages_ gave Mark Twain's wife no more than a
nameless, passing reference.  Melton mentions Olivia's name, but only to
quote from a letter she received from her husband.  So in this book, Mark
Twain is once again an island with no wife, no daughters, no worldwide
lecture tours, and no peripatetic family life overseas.

Versus Ziff, Melton scores a major point for recognizing Mark Twain's
laziness claims for what they are:

     Twain used laziness as a pose throughout his career, and it is a
     prominent character trait that he projected both within and outside
     his books.  Yet by combining his feigned inveterate laziness with a
     vastly popular travel-book persona, he made his joke all the more
     shrewd and effective. (83)

Mark Twain worked hard, but he also had the good fortune to meet the right
people at the right time:

     The actual [Quaker City] tour, of course, changed Samuel Clemens
     forever, giving to him an opportunity that led to financial and
     literary status he could never have obtained as a roving journalist
     or newspaper editor... (60)

Opportunity, thy name is Olivia!  Unfortunately, there is no mention of her
in this passage, or even the fact that her brother was a fellow Quaker City
passenger.  Samuel Clemens, the brilliant autodidact, would have succeeded
eventually by one means or another; but destiny came up the gangway in the
form of an ivory miniature portrait in Charley Langdon's pocket..

One must give Melton credit for staying on topic.  When he resolves to
scrutinize Mark Twain's accepted canon of travel books, he sticks to it:
No mention of Mark Twain's other writings set abroad (_Tom Sawyer Abroad_,
_Joan of Arc_, _Connecticut Yankee_, _The Prince and the Pauper_, etc.); no
travel-book apochrypha such as "The Great Sea Wilderness"; and again, nary
a word about the years the Clemenses lived in Europe--which leads us to a
mystery. Melton is so determined to focus only on the travel books, with no
mention of the Clemens family's residences abroad, then why does Dr. Carl
Dolmetsch's authoritative _Our Famous Guest: Mark Twain in Vienna_
(University of Georgia Press) appear in the bibliography?

One must keep in mind--as if one could forget--that Mark Twain for years
lived in the very Europe he had so popularly mocked.  Could his
"everlasting exile abroad" have contributed to his changing worldview?  By
the time of _Following the Equator_, Mark Twain had already lived in Italy,
Germany, France, and Switzerland.

A quick survey of Alan Gribben's _Mark Twain's Library: A Reconstruction_
(1980) will show that Mark Twain was also quite the travel reader.  Melton
cites William Cowper Prime's _Tent Life in the Holy Land_, yet the book
does not appear in the "works cited" bibliography.  (Thomas J. Dimsdale's
_The Vigilantes of Montana_ and Edward Whymper's _Scrambles Amongst the
Alps_ suffer the same fate.)  An interesting footnote to the passage about
Prime, courtesy of Gribben, would have been that "Mark Twain's  unfinished
play--'The _Quaker City_ Holy Land Excursion' (MTP), written in
1867--suggests that Prime's book was one of the tiresome volumes in the
ship library." (2: 560)  This unfinished play, a potential foil in the
hands of one Melton has dubbed our "leading actor," goes unmentioned.  Also
missing is the fact that Richard Henry Dana's _Two Years Before the Mast_,
which Melton cites, was a favorite and significant holding in Mark Twain's
personal library, meriting a lengthy entry in Gribben's formidable opus.

Alan Gribben, Melton's mentor and colleague at the University of Alabama,
is credited in the acknowledgments for reading and editing the present
manuscript over the years (x).  So it is likely for space reasons that
nuggets such as those in the previous paragraph are not included; and for
the same reason, perhaps, that many of the books and dissertations
mentioned in the endnotes are not in the bibliography or index.  Those who
skip reading the endnotes will miss seeing a wealth of bibliographic
information.

On a further bibliographic note, the University of Alabama Press's press
release blithely asserts that Melton's book is the "first full-length work
to treat Twain's travel narratives in depth."  Yet Melton himself cites
Richard Bridgman's _Traveling in Mark Twain_ (1987) for having done so
before him (3). To that, one could add Robert M. Rodney's _Mark Twain
Overseas_ (Three Continents Press, 1993).  In fact, Rodney's book provides
just the sort of biographical water needed to surround, and place in
context, Melton's Mark Twain travel-book islands.

Melton throughout the book poses Mark Twain in two ways: as the "leading
actor" on a "global stage" (xv); and as a sort of pioneering tourist
hanging ten on a monster-sized wave headed for Oahu and...the world. "Mark
Twain stands at the beginning of the great social tide of American
tourism." (Ibid.)

By design, Melton leaves Mark Twain suspended there, riding that crest.
Mark Twain buffs know the rest of the story. The tourism tsunami first
touched Hannibal in 1935 and by the 1960s resulted in an immigrant
community being nearly obliterated to prepare the way for anticipated
hoards of motorized tourists soon to be arriving for the big show.  (See
Gregg Andrews, _City of Dust: A Cement Company Town in the Land of Tom
Sawyer_ and _Insane Sisters: Or, the Price Paid for Challenging a Company
Town_, both from University of Missouri Press, reviewed for the Mark Twain
Forum on 11 December 1996 and 30 November 1999).  Just as Melton writes,
"Tourism is an ever-expanding collection of cultural productions, staged in
varying forms and contexts around the globe, all promising authenticity but
at the same time remaining unable to provide it." (14)

Had Mark Twain still been around in 1973, he would have learned that Arrow
Rock, Missouri, was chosen to represent "St. Petersburg" in a Reader's
Digest film version of "Tom Sawyer"--presumably for looking more like
Hannibal than Hannibal.  Even on our actor-surfer's home turf, "the real
never attains the magnitude of the imagined place." (159)

* * * *

ABOUT THE REVIEWER:  Mary Leah Christmas is an award-winning freelance
writer/editor with a background in book publishing. She first became
interested in Mark Twain when, as a teenager, her parents inadvertently bid
on the wrong box-lot of books at an auction and became the owners of an
1876 edition of _Innocents Abroad_. This is her eighth review for the Mark
Twain Forum.